


Her Lovely Face Gleaming Like a White Poppy

by loathlylady



Category: Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:44:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loathlylady/pseuds/loathlylady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The paths which Attolia and Eddis take are both paved with loss, but the ways they walk those paths are very different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Lovely Face Gleaming Like a White Poppy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miri Cleo (miri_cleo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miri_cleo/gifts).



> The title is from Poem 61 by Catullus, which is believed by some people to be translated from a now lost _epithamalion_ by Sappho. The whole line, from [the translation by A.S. Kline](http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Catullus.htm#_Toc531846786) reads:
>
>> Now bridegroom, you may come:  
> your wife waits in your bed,  
> her lovely face gleaming,  
> like a white poppy,  
> on a saffron field.
> 
> An _epithalamion_ is a song sung by boys and girls at the door of the bridal chamber in Ancient Greece, in praise of the bride and groom — generally their physical beauty. Marriage was a major rite of passage for women in Ancient Greece and marked their transition from girlhood to adulthood, and since the series is heavily inspired by the pre-Christian Mediterranean, I decided to roll with it. Attolia and Eddis are certainly not girls and haven’t been for a while, but I thought it would interesting to look at scenes from their lives as girls and their transitions into adulthood, and sort of glue together with the marriage preparations for Eddis and Sounis. I did try to get almost everything you requested in your prompt, dear recipient, and I hope I was successful. In conclusion, long fic is long; I assure you that it was as much of surprise to me as it no doubt is to you.
> 
> My apologies to any classicists who are reading this and scratching their heads at the translation or the names -- if it doesn't ring a bell as an actual Greek name, it's because I made it up with gleeful disregard to facts. The story in the first section? Also totally made up.
> 
> Many, many, _many_ thanks to my beta, cheerleader, and all around butt kicker, A. Without her, this would be a sad lump of a story and I would be quivering in a corner somewhere. A chocolate Yulegoat to you!

  


Unnoticed in the commotion surrounding the preparations for the prince’s hunt, a tall, awkward girl slipped through the rushing attendants and spearbearers in the hunting court, narrowly dodging collision on several occasions. She felt that she might reach her goal right up until she tried to sneak past the guards surrounding the prince, who were not so inattentive or preoccupied.

She was caught by the shoulder as she tried to dodge by a man with a nose which leaned so far to the right, the nasal guard on his helmet had little hope of protecting it.

“Now see here, girl,” he began, but was halted by the look she gave him from beneath a mop of thick, dark hair which no amount of hair oil could entirely control. With the guard’s sudden grip on her shoulder, her braid had slid precipitously down her forehead, and she peered from under it like a disgruntled bird from its nest beneath the eaves of the palace.

“Your Highness,” the guard said, without reverence, “where are your servants?”

She did not answer, but switched to a less challenging dead fish stare.

“Your servants,” the guard repeated, annoyed at receiving no answer from Attolis’s extra child, who stared mutely at him. “Where are they? Your guard? Where is Klimon?”

“That’s no way to get an answer out of a little girl,” one of the other guards interjected. “You’ll scare her, Promeus.”

“This one has never been a little girl,” Promeus said, having been raised on a farm far from the city and having an entirely different idea of what little girls were than these palace folk. “She will answer me.”

“Only if it please His Highness that she do so, and it will not.” The voice which said this was authoritative and amused, without the coarse barracks rhythms of the guards’. It belonged to Hyperion, one of the prince’s attendants. He smiled at her and held out a hand.

“Hello, Irene. Have you come to farewell your brother before his hunt?”

She nodded and squirmed out of Promeus’s grasp to place her hand in Hyperion’s. Without a backward glance, he led her to the knot of the prince’s closest attendants and confidants. Irene could feel Promeus’s hot glare following them the entire distance, as disgruntled at having to let her go without a scolding as she had been at being caught. It didn’t really matter, because once Klimon and her nurse found her, she was in for a scolding anyway. If her plan was successful, then she might be able to delay it for several hours. She sighed a little, and Hyperion looked down at her, somehow managing to look concerned and amused at the same time, as if her adolescent melancholy were there as diversion for him.

“Irene!” her brother exclaimed when he saw her, rushing toward them. “What are you doing here? All by yourself?”

He was much taller and much older than she was, and she had to crane her head back to get a good look at his face, even as tall as she had grown in the past year. His was possibly the first kind face she had seen all day, though that kindness was currently overlaid with confusion. Even Hyperion had not really looked at her kindly, and unlike Promeus’s demands as to why she was unaccompanied, her brother sounded as if he actually worried about her, rather than being interested in someone else’s failure to do their duty.

“Oh, please, brother, won’t you take me with you?” she cried, all her careful layers of planning and manipulation undone in that moment by his fondness for her. The prince did favors for everybody and was everybody’s friend, his way of preparing for the day he would succeed to the throne. She had never really asked him for a favor before this, and he performed such large ones for people he did not really like. She hoped that if he had weak spot, it was her.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. The prince looked horrified by the suggestion.

“With me? On the _hunt?_ Irene, it’s not the proper place for you.”

“There are other ladies going,” she protested. “I could ride with them.” She poked the toe of her boot out from the hem of her dress, the sturdiest pair she owned, though they were still tooled with scrolling borders and tied with a silk lace. “I am even dressed for it.”

The prince looked at the women gathered near the horses, some of them laughing with his attendants. One of them tossed her head, and the jewels in her earrings caught the sun like beacons, dancing with Hyperion’s laughter.

“No,” he said again, shaking his head. “You are much too young.”

“The Eddisian princesses hunt.”

“This is not Eddis, and you are not an Eddisian princess.”

“I _wish_ I were.” She opened her mouth to say more, but her brother laid a finger on her lips, looking around to see if anyone had overheard.

“That is treasonous, Irene,” he said quietly, “and you will do yourself and none of us any favors to speak so. Even as young as you are. You must be more circumspect. Smile, speak as if there are honeyed dates in your mouth, and always, always love Attolia with every breath you take.”

“You get to do so many things,” she said when he lifted his finger away, sullen and sad at having disappointed him with her quick mouth. “All I do is sit with the court ladies and embroider. They are as bad as my tutor from Ferria.”

The prince had had the same tutor, and while there was something about the quirk of his mouth which suggested she had a point, he did not have the experience with the court ladies to know how being treated like a rather exotic kind of lap dog felt. She wondered sometimes if being able to balance a ball on the end of her nose would improve her status any.

“Let us make a bargain,” he said slowly. “You are too young now, but perhaps by the time you have embroidered me a shirt, you will be old enough. Promise me you will practice your embroidery and being a lady —” smiling a little, he pushed her braid back into place and pinned it there “— and not a hoyden, and I will promise you that I will take you riding when the shirt is done.”

“Not hunting?” she asked querulously.

“The boars are very dangerous, and I love you too well to put you in harm’s way.”

“We could hunt something else.”

“Boars go where boars will, and they will be there regardless of our quarry.”

She considered this, balancing the opportunity against the sacrifice she would have to make. Embroidering an entire shirt would take years, but she might manage a collar and cuffs before winter. And he had not said it had to be a _whole_ shirt, just _a_ shirt.

“It is very kind of you to make the offer, and it pleases me to accept,” she said, on the principle that the sooner one began, the sooner one achieved one’s goals.

“A lovely start,” the prince said approvingly. He was interrupted by a sudden chorus of shouts from the outer perimeter of his guards — Klimon had finally tracked her down and was arguing with Promeus over their jurisdictions in the matter of her disappearance.

She sighed again, and this time instead of amusement, she received a kiss on top of her head from the prince.

“I will escort you to Klimon to ease the matter,” he said. “Go to the ladies, try those new manners, and I will see you at dinner tonight with our father.”

 

Klimon deposited her at the door to the public chamber where the court ladies spent their afternoons doing needlework and gossiping. He gave her a sour look.

“You will be their problem while I find your nurse from whatever dither she’s gotten herself into over you,” he said in his bear’s voice. “If you run off again . . .” He trailed off, unable to bring himself to threaten a member of the royal family, but his face got his point across.

The ladies inside the room rose as one as the attendant at the door announced her. They bobbed in unison, like a chorus of pigeons walking across the courtyard, and having greeted her, forgot her to return to their needles and spindles.

Irene wandered to the window on the far wall, which overlooked a gate. If she stretched on her toes, she could see the cloud of dust that the hunting party’s horses raised and in it the riders. There went the outriders, to make sure the route was safe for the prince and his entourage, and then came her brother and his attendants. The women mixed among them, their bright veils twisted about their heads and shoulders against the dust. Jealousy rose in her, pinched into annoyance by the baying hounds which loped behind them across the field outside the palace walls.

“Come away from the window, please, Your Highness,” one of the ladies urged from behind her. “Join us in our needlework — see how industrious the other young ladies are.”

Irene turned and looked at the cluster of girls sitting on the low benches near the middle of the room. They all had their workbaskets sitting next to their feet, and all of them had their hands busy with some dainty work. The thread on their spindles did not snap and snarl, and their embroidery was not so smudged as to be not worth finishing. And they looked back at her with faces as bland and innocuously pleasant as the figures in the mural in her room — she had always suspected it of being instructive.

The lady who had spoken beckoned to her, and Irene settled on the bench next to her. She was wife to a very minor northern baron whom nobody could remember the name of, and she did not bother to introduce herself as she handed Irene a spindle and a handful of wool.

“Do you know the story of Iolanthe and her sister Leta?” she asked. “My mother used to tell it to me while she taught me to spin.”

The princess opened her mouth to answer, but another lady spoke over her.

“You tell that one so badly, Phresine,” the lady said. “It is wrong in every particular. Let me tell it.”

“I know you find storytelling tiresome, Xanthippe, and if it would inconvenience —”

“Oh, I never find it tiresome when I am doing it. Only when others get the stories wrong, and I cannot bring myself to be so rude as to correct them.”

Phresine’s face was blank as she wrapped the spun yarn onto the shaft of her spindle.

“If you insist, then of course you must, Xanthippe,” she said, drafting more wool from the cloud under her arm.

Xanthippe smiled hugely. Her face was carefully made up, thick kohl lining her eyes and her mouth rubbed red with ocher. Her hair was twisted and curled around her head so elaborately that Irene could not tell how much of it was real and how much of it was fake. Xanthippe prodded an errant curl back into the coiffure and cleared her throat.

“The story of Iolanthe and her sister Leta is a very good one for young ladies,” she began. “You all must attend, for there is something for every girl to learn from it.”

 

_Now, it so happened that many years ago there was a king who had two daughters. The eldest was named Iolanthe and the younger Leta. Though their father loved them both dearly, as fathers sometimes do, they were as different as sisters could be. Iolanthe was very beautiful, with rounded white limbs and thick dark hair and bright black eyes. There was no hope of Leta ever being able to compare to her sister, and so Leta strove to be clever. Where her sister spun, Leta studied. Where Iolanthe learned to speak low and sweet, Leta made her voice carry. Where Iolanthe practiced every artifice to enhance her beauty for the pleasure of others, Leta made herself agreeable with her quick wit. They were equals in the extremity of their gifts, and to the bewilderment of many, neither lacked for suitors though none were accepted by either girl._

_From a neighboring kingdom came a man newly made king in the passing of his father. He had heard of the sisters, even at the distance he lived, and wished to see them both to judge whether one could become his queen. He was all that was handsome and becoming in a man — a good figure, fine eyes, and not too rash of a temper — so he was assured that it was a question of_ could _rather than_ would. __

 _To his surprise, it became a question of_ which, _for he could not decide between the two, the clever or the beautiful, and both seemed disposed to marry him. So he devised a contest in order to determine which would become his queen: whichever girl found a white poppy first, she would be his wife._

_As everyone who is anyone knows, all poppies had once been white, but some god in his grief at the loss of a favored one in battle had declared them all red. Girls wear them now at weddings, as a reminder of mortality for this very reason, but if the young king would be married, then his bride would wear white poppies._

_“Young man,” the father of Iolanthe and Leta protested, “this is an impossible task. There is not a single one to be found, and I will not have my daughters set against each other when neither can win.” In truth, he did not like them to be set against each other when only one could win._

_“That is not so,” the young king assured him. “The north wind keeps them in the garden at his temple.”_

_“The north wind!” the old king exclaimed. “The north wind travels in ways men cannot, and his temple is likewise placed. What makes you think women can find it if men are not able?”_

_“I have faith in your daughters. If there are any two women in the world who can, it is them.”_

_The old king gave into this with ill grace, and told the young king that if he would take one of this daughters from him by marriage, he would not take both by his own foolishness. It would be up to his daughters to judge the risk for themselves._

_So, it was set before the daughters, and neither of them had a protest with it. Both of them loved the young king, but also loved each other without jealousness. If he could not decide between them, then they would decide for him through a fair contest. They made ready for their travels in their own ways. Leta set off with a map and stout shoes, determined to use logic and cartography to find her way. Iolanthe knew, however, that the north wind could not resist blowing the hair and clothes of any girl silly enough to wander near the forest where his temple was located. Once she had drawn him in, she would ask him to show her the way._

_But where Leta was clever, her sister was not, and Iolanthe had forgotten that the north wind does not deal kindly with those who set out to tease him deliberately. Instead of appearing to her and allowing her to sweeten him into showing the way to his temple, he blew Iolanthe straight into a bramble hidden among the trees in his forest. When she cried the name of the young king, the north wind came and whispered harshly in the ear of the king to come and collect his nuisance._

_As the young king watched Iolanthe weeping at the scratches on her arms and legs, he saw that she was very lovely — far more lovely than her sister — and he wondered that he had ever thought a contest necessary to decide upon the two. Iolanthe’s white face gleamed in the shadowy forest light, and her eyes were black and shining, both from her tears. Her lips blushed red, bitten in her extremity. He need look no farther, for Iolanthe had found his white poppy for him, though it had proved to be no flower. He raised Iolanthe up in his arms and carried her to her father, declaring the contest won._

_But the old king protested. The younger man had entered into an agreement with him and his daughters, and that agreement must be upheld or else the young king was not honorable enough to marry either of his daughters. If he wished to end it like this, then he must contact Leta and ask her if she was willing to abide by these new terms._

_Leta, all unaware to these developments, had gotten herself thoroughly lost in the north wind’s forest. She was in no better shape than her sister — the brambles had torn her robe and taken down her hair, and she was bleeding from deep scratches that would undoubtedly scar. She was no gleaming poppy; more than anything else she looked like a tangled-up, goat pasture weed. But she did not let this deter her, and though she was lost, she drew ever closer to the temple with every fumbling step._

_The north wind, pleased to have completed his errand and returning home, was annoyed to see yet another girl so close to his temple, especially when this one was already tattered and he could not use it to drive her off. He appeared to Leta in the form of a pale young man, storms tossing in his eyes and hurricanes blowing in his long hair. If he could not scare her off with brambles, then he would do it with his godly aspect._

_“What are you doing here?” he demanded, but Leta, used to such demands from men in the libraries, took no notice of his short tone._

_“I am looking for something,” she replied._

_“What are you looking for?”_

_“A white poppy, so that I can marry a handsome king. He told me that they grew in a temple near here.”_

_The north wind considered this a strange mission, and said as much, but Leta responded that of all the routes to marriage, this was one of the more direct ones. As an afterthought, she added, “You should comb your hair,” which both displeased the god and deflated his confidence in his aspect._

_“Well,” the north wind said, mischief brewing in him, “if it is a white poppy you want, it is a white poppy you will get, but I do not think it is the one the king is looking for.”_

_“He did not give specifics,” Leta said. “Any white poppy will do.”_

_“If you say so,” the god said and disappeared on a gust of wind, to return with a poppy in his hand._

_Leta thanked him and returned to her home by the path she came, which if it went more swiftly in the return, she did not take much notice. When she arrived, her father and the young king were still in deep debate over the best course to pursue in contacting Leta, whom they thought still deep in the forest._

_“I’m back,” she said without ceremony, white poppy before her. She was not prepared for the looks she got in return at her odd appearance and the flower clutched in her hand._

_“I’m afraid I have to tell you something,” the young king said, leaping at this chance when she stood right before them. “I’ve decided to marry your sister and not you.”_

_But before she could form a response, the north wind snatched the poppy from her hand, and she was left standing before her sister and the young king in tatters. Without the poppy, she could not win the contest, and without the poppy she saw how her sister clung to the king’s arm and what a neat, matched set they made in their beauty. She could not compare to them either, and so let herself go into the north wind like the poppy, a thing of thought and memory and no more._

_Iolanthe and the king lived happily together for many years, and so it can be seen how not even cleverness and the hand of the gods can drive apart true love._

 

“Your Highness, what did you think of my story?” asked Xanthippe when she was finished.

Irene thought it was a very stupid story, and that Leta didn’t have much business calling herself clever if she never once succeeded in anything she did and people only called her so because she was not beautiful.

“I suppose it is an interesting sort of story,” she said, which was the diplomatic phrasing her tutors used when she gave an answer which was wrong from beginning to end, but which they did not know where to start to correcting.

Like it had her until she had heard it too many times, this answer seemed to please Xanthippe, and she smiled at Irene in much the same way she did at a bowl of sugared almonds, something little and sweet to please her.

“And which would you rather be, little one? Clever or beautiful?”

Nearly as tall as Xanthippe already, Irene did not appreciate this endearment. She was not little and she was not sweet, and she resented that people insisted on treating her as if she were, and since she was not, treating her as if she should _want_ to be. And she certainly wasn’t stupid, so she could tell when she was being condescended to.

“There is no hope for my being beautiful,” Irene replied, knowing it was the wrong answer even as she said it, “and being clever did not seem to work out well for Leta, so I think I would rather be like you, Lady Xanthippe.”

It took a moment for this to work its way through Xanthippe’s curly, pampered head as an insult, but when it did, the effect was galvanic. She waved her little, ringed hands and furrowed her forehead in a terrible scowl, ruining the work that had gone into combing and shaping her thick eyebrows into a fashionable arch.

Before her anger could manifest itself in some action detrimental to everyone in the room when the king or his son learned of it, the lady who had first spoken grabbed Irene by the hand and started pulling her to the door.

“Come, Your Highness,” Phresine said very loudly, “your nurse has asked for you. It is time for you to start dressing for your audience with the king, your father.” She threw open the door, and Klimon was on the other side, hand raised to knock. Phresine nodded to him sharply, and he overcame his surprise to scurry after them down the hall.

“That one does not know first thing about what is good for her,” Phresine said as she dragged Irene down the corridors to her rooms, Klimon following behind them at nearly a trot. “One day you will be able to tell any lady what you think of her with a single look, but that day has not yet come.”

“It’s not fair. Someone should tell her now, so when I’m older I don’t have to.” Irene’s shoes skidded on the timeworn stones of the floor, and Phresine had to wait for her to regain her balance. The older woman stooped to tie the lace in the princess’s boot which had come undone in her skidding.

“I think you just did.” There was a touch of humor in her voice when she spoke, as if the little distance between them and Xanthippe had quenched her temper.

“She didn’t listen.” Irene studied the silver threads running through Phresine’s dark hair. She was probably the oldest woman Irene had ever met, probably as old as her father. “You could tell her.”

Phresine’s head bent further as she gave a final knot to the lace.

“My day hasn’t come yet, either,” she said, standing and offering her hand to Irene again. “It never happens for some ladies.”

“How can you tell whether it will happen or not?”

“The beautiful ones almost always, and the clever ones almost never.” Phresine’s words had the ring of truth to them, which appealed to Irene beyond the novelty that it was. The lines bracketing Phresine’s mouth deepened before she spoke again. “If a lady is both beautiful and clever, then only if she acts less clever than she is.”

Not liking this answer past its directness, Irene refused her hand and went down the hall, as stately as she could manage with one boot too tight and the other too loose. Phresine followed behind her, wordless, until they reached the door to her rooms and Klimon opened it for them. The guard room was nearly deserted, the guards probably out looking for her. Her nurse was waiting in the anteroom before the bedchamber, nearly as agitated as Xanthippe.

The nurse was tight-lipped and disapproving all the while she helped Irene change her clothes, pushing her arms into the sleeves of her gown without too much care and yanking impatiently at the tangles in her hair with the comb. Irene was silent through it all, too tired and cross to complain, even when her nurse pinned her braid so tightly to her head it ached.

“Oh!” Her nurse picked up her best sash from its special box. She poked her finger through a hole in the blue silk. “You’ve torn it, and now I will have to fix it before your dinner. Wait here and do not move an inch.” She hurried into the anteroom for the mending box.

Abandoned again, Irene looked at the pointed toe of her silk slipper, embroidered with poppies and trailing vines. Useless, just like Leta and her so-called cleverness. She looked away from it, and the round faces in the mural looked back at her, mouths pursed into perfect, sweet pouts. Every single slight and annoyance from the day came flooding back, from being refused to accompany the hunt to disappointing her brother to Xanthippe’s stupid story to Phresine telling her the truth. Her frustration mounted in her until it could not be choked back any longer, and she ripped the wretched slipper from her foot and threw it across the room.

It struck an amphora on her dressing table, her very favorite one, as chance would have it. The amphora was painted with dancing girls, and they seemed to sway as the amphora tumbled to the floor. It smashed against the tiles with an enormous noise, and her nurse was at the door in an instant, the half-mended sash dangling from her fingers.

“Your Highness!” she exclaimed. “What have you done, you naughty child?”

They stared dumbly at each other for a moment, but as the scent of the spilt hair oil reached her nose, Irene burst into tears, much like the amphora. Guilty now, her nurse had her in her arms at once.

“Oh, hush, hush, my baby,” her nurse crooned. “I am sorry I was short with you. You gave me such a scare when you disappeared like that, and I did not want to think what might have happened.”

Irene burrowed her face into the soft wool of her nurse’s gown, relieved that she had been handed such an easy explanation for the tears. It all felt too large, and it was as if her heart were throwing itself up against the bars of some cage, too strong to be escaped from, except in gasping sobs and whimpers.

And then, an hour later, the frustrations leading up to the breaking of the amphora were totally eclipsed by the arrival of her brother’s body in the hunting court, thrown face-down over the back of his own horse. His head lolled without support from his neck, and his cloak was saturated with blood in a wide patch across the upper back. He was announced, not by the fanfare of trumpets and the hoarse shouting of the guards at the gate, but by the uncertain whine of one of the hunting dogs, until it too was kicked into silence.

  


Her brother lay small in her memory in later years. In time, she stopped thinking of him by his name — he had been called after their father — and thought of him only as her brother who was dead. As the awkwardness of her adolescence dropped away and was replaced by the smooth, beautiful face of a temple statue, she thought of him as the prince who had fallen. Fallen as she would not. Giving him a name or some significance greater than she did would only crack the marble facing and show the inferior stone underneath. Stone that cracked let the water in that made it fall after the winter, and the winters in Attolia were not warm. She would not fall. She would remember what she must, but she would not fall.

  


“Hurry, hurry!” cried one of the matrons gathered in the bedchamber set aside for Eddis’s wedding preparations. Attolia thought she might have been the aunt who had accompanied Eddis during the negotiations for her wedding several years before, but there was such a crowd of relatives in the room she could not be sure. “Poor Helen will freeze before you reach the bath at the rate you are moving.”

“The amphora is heavy,” panted the girl who carried it. She had a circlet set over her carefully braided hair, and it had slipped to one side in her struggles, giving her a tumbled air that would have had her sent from the room at Attolia’s court. The water for her own nuptial bath had been borne in a small ceremonial jar by two solemn-faced girls dressed identically in white gowns and crowned with poppies. The Eddisian girl who carried the amphora today might have been hauling water from the village well for her family, if not for the circlet and the joyful excitement in the room. If anyone here doubted the decision of their queen, it did not show on their faces. Attolia did not know where she might have found even a fraction of their number in her own country.

“You are supposed to remember the weight on your own wedding day, Thetis,” the queen of Eddis said from where she shivered beside the bath in her shift. “So that you are reminded of the work that goes into marriage.”

Thetis made an impatient noise as she tipped the contents of the amphora into the bath. The scent of roses and myrrh rose from the steaming water to fill the room.

“I think,” she said over the gurgling water, “I will become a priestess to spare whatever cousin gets roped into doing this for me.”

“And what would young Cleon have to say about that?” teased one of the younger matrons from her spot near the window.

“I imagine he would get over it,” she said stiffly.

Thetis flushed as all the other women in the room laughed. Eddis laughed too, but gently, and pulled the girl close to drop a kiss on the top of her head and straighten the circlet.

“Thank you, Thetis,” she said. “You may go now.” The girl fled the room, leaving the amphora crooked in its stand. Eddis straightened that too, and shucking her shift, climbed into the bath and started splashing.

The difference between this and the preparations for her marriage were marked, Attolia thought. She might have been preparing for a funeral, for all the laughter that had been in that room. The foolishness of her citizens made her want to smile, and she realized she already was. She touched her lips. Had she ever had a chance to make such girlish proclamations of intent? Her smiled faded. Perhaps it had been a funeral of sorts. The prospect did not sadden her.

“We should have done this in the summer,” Eddis said as she was toweled dry and the sweet oil that had been warming by the fire was rubbed into her skin. Even with the heavy tapestries hanging on the walls and the fire roaring in the fireplace, the promise of a mountain winter invaded the room. It was only autumn, but already snow dusted the ground.

“Weddings happen this time of year to keep you busy until spring,” the woman who had teased Thetis said slyly. The matrons laughed as Eddis blushed nearly as red as Thetis had.

“Only until spring?” Attolia said amidst the laughter. “How short-lived love is in Eddis.”

The laughter ebbed, until a baroness said, “It’s not the love that runs out,” which made the aunt who had first spoken whoop. “Certainly not the love,” she choked, and had to be pounded on the back by one of her companions to catch her breath.

“What these soldiers lack in poetry, they make up for in endurance,” protested a woman lost somewhere near the fringes of the room.

“But only to a point. The war drum starts beating at the village fountain and they forget everything else,” the aunt said. And what, Attolia thought, was a queen to think of but the beating of that drum? To Eddis, the aunt said, “Just you wait, chickie. You will have as much poetry from Sounis as you can endure. I have seen him looking at you. He is brimming with it. You had better be prepared to stop his mouth if necessary.”

“Kisses work,” someone called, cuing more laughter.

Attolia caught Eddis’s eyes as a linen shift so sheer as to be nearly transparent was lowered over her head. It was not a lack of poetry which concerned her, which had concerned either of them. The other women did not understand.

She did not get a chance to get close to the bride until she had been entirely dressed in layer upon layer of fine fabric and jewelry, the last donned with some exclamation over certain pieces which were missing from the chest. Attolia suspected that her husband who was Attolis would have some knowledge of their current whereabouts and that they would miraculously reappear in the chest or on an altar in the morning.

The only item left for the bridal attire was the veil, dyed golden yellow with saffron and embroidered with clear glass beads and silver spangles in the shape of stars. Fringes of silver-wrapped silk hung from its edges, headed with wine-red braid to match the overgown Eddis wore. It was too thick to be seen through, and Eddis would walk to the ceremony blind, guided by the married women around her. It was Attolia’s duty as the most recently married woman present to drape the veil over her head and to lead her to the altar by the hand. Eugenides would do the same for Sounis, the red sash which all Eddisian soldiers wore tied over Sounis’s eyes.

She approached her slowly, holding the veil, heavy with its finery, tightly in her hands. The other women still laughed and joked around them, but they seemed far away as she draped the veil over the back of Eddis’s head. Her eyes, Attolia saw, had very little of their usual confidence.

“It is too late to change your mind now,” she murmured as she pinned the veil on one side to the band embroidered with poppies and wheat sheaves tied around Eddis’s head.

“I don’t want to,” the other queen said, smiling without hesitation for the first time that morning.

“Neither did I.” She pinned the other side and studied her friend — yes, friend — for a moment. Making up her mind, she grasped the edges of the veil to lower it over Eddis’s face, but before doing so said, “Helen, he will be as blind as you are. You must guide each other with the little you both can see. It will be different, but no less important. You will only stumble if neither of you are paying attention.”

Eddis released a breath, sweet with the cloves one of her cousins had made her chew.

“I know,” she said. “I think I told you something similar once, but the saying is easier than the doing.”

Impulsively, Attolia leaned forward and kissed her briefly, once on each cheek. Helen gazed back at her, calmer now, her determination renewed. Attolia grinned, and if Eddis noted its similarity to her cousin’s she did not remark on it.

“Kisses do work. Experience makes me suggest you develop the skill,” Attolia whispered as she leaned close to lower the veil over Eddis’s laughing cry of, “Irene!”

  


Sitting at her desk and facing away from any entrance, Attolia was first aware of Eugenides’s presence in the room when he dangled the fibula pin which closed the straps of her gown in front of her eyes. It was in the shape of a swooping bird, with chips of sapphire glinting for eyes — they sparked in the afternoon sun slanting through the windows.

“Impossible,” she said as the strap fell away from her shoulder. She glanced back at him without turning. The latch on the door snicked as her attendants slipped out and left them alone.

Her new husband grinned.

“Of course it is possible. I’ve just done it,” he said, watching the descent of the strap with interest. He ran a finger rough with callus along the line of her bare shoulder, and she steeled herself against the gooseflesh raised over her body. She was reminded so often now that she was made of flesh, and she was uncertain of it still.

“I do not know that the things you find possible should be used as a standard to judge their possibility in general.”

“Perhaps not.” His amusement was punctuated with a tug on the other strap and the fabric’s sigh as it fell to her waist. His hand still stroked her shoulder.

“So,” she said coolly, belied by the rosy patches on her cheeks, “you will peel me like an orange.”

“Like a grape.” He replaced his hand with his mouth and scraped his teeth delicately across her tender skin. She shivered. “You carry your skin close.” After soothing the spot he had bitten, he murmured against her, “And you look nothing at all like an orange.”

Startled by this comment in the midst of what had been shaping up to be a very efficient seduction, she laughed in disbelief and turned to face him, gathering her gown up to cover herself as she went.

“A grape?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“You, ah, improve with age?” he suggested, caught off balance. When she frowned, he tried, “Burgundy becomes you.”

“You are no poet,” she said, trapped somewhere between reproving and amused.

This seemed to annoy him far beyond the mild rebuff it carried, until he looked suddenly fey and satisfied, a creature of the old gods emerged from the forest with his curls in disarray and his heart unbounded by society’s strictures. The artful attentions of his attendants could account for the curls, but her breath caught to contemplate the reasoning for the other. Heart for her heart.

“No more than you are a grape, thank the gods,” he said. “Poets know only longing — thieves deal in results.”

“And do you deal in results now?”

He grinned again, more than half wild.

“With you, always,” he swore.

She was not stone. She was flesh, and she bent to such promises like a reed to the wind.

“And my barons?” She straightened against his intensity, not yet breaking, though her heart beat beneath the thin cloth she held pressed to chest. “Do you deal in results there?”

“Not, I hope, the same ones,” he muttered. Something in her turned at his petulance, and smiling, she let her dress fall again as she rose and set her lips against his.

  


She remembers Hyperion’s laughter. He laughed often, especially in her brother’s company, and it was a strange thing at a court so formal. But it was far stranger that on a day when a man had died, whom he had proclaimed dearer than a brother and sworn oaths to, Hyperion’s laughter could be heard ringing somewhere in the warren of corridors surrounding the king’s rooms. Her father did not remark on it, and so neither did Irene, but she heard it all the same as the changes in her life were explained to her.

When she was shown out of her father’s rooms, head still reeling with everything that had been told to her, her nurse was not waiting for her. Instead there were three ladies, intimidating and strange to her. If they spent their afternoons spinning in the room overlooking the gate, she had not seen them.

“Your Highness,” one said. “You will please follow us to your rooms.”

The corridors they led her down were as strange to her as they were in their cool, embroidered silks. As they drew closer to their destination, the way become familiar to her, but she did not recognize it until they turned the last corner.

“This is not the way to my rooms,” she said, voice hoarse from her earlier weeping.

“It is, Your Highness,” a different lady insisted.

“It is _not.”_

“Not your old rooms, no,” replied the first lady coolly.

Her brother’s rooms were not as she remembered them. There was paint still wet on the walls, washing out the old murals and wall decorations. It was a white, empty space, with new and delicate furniture placed without care in the rooms. Her own clothes were not yet in the wardrobes, but were piled up on the bed, with some lying discarded on the floor. Not fine enough for this blank space and whatever it would come to hold.

Of her brother there was no trace. Any speck of his existence had been thoroughly removed while she was closeted with their father, while he made hasty changes in the course of her life. She would leave the palace soon and go to the megaron of whomever had been chosen as her husband. The word was foreign in her head, like one learned in another language but never translated into her own.

Looking around the nearly empty space, familiar and foreign all at once like the word, she spotted something shiny and small lolling in a corner. Gold and round, ridged with lines — a button. A gold button with a thread still dangling from it, which she recognized from one of her brother’s tunics.

She was just reaching for it, when one of the cool-faced ladies came and scooped it up before her.

“My apologies, Your Highness, for this piece of refuse being left to lie. I will make sure the servants are more attentive in the future.”

Irene felt her mouth fall open on a protest, but before a sound could escape, she closed her mouth and made her face like stone to match the lady's, unable to let this woman see what she wanted so much.

“Do so,” she said, the foreign and familiar words filling her mouth.

  


Eddis had just placed the last silver cup etched with leaping fish on the shrine to Oceanus when she heard someone walking with a deliberately heavy tread behind her. Twisting as she reached for the bowl of blessed wine at her side, she saw it was the magus of Sounis, still trapped in Eddis by his own discretion.

“Magus,” she greeted him when he reached her. “What brings you here?”

He tipped his head toward the altar.

“I have come to see the oddity of a temple to an ocean god in a mountain country which is almost entirely landlocked. I didn’t expect to see you.”

She smiled.

“Even mountain folk may go on sea journeys,” she said as she began filling the cups with the best wine the megaron’s cellars could offer.

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Going on a sea journey.”

“If you are looking for information on my political maneuvers, the answer is no,” she said with a touch of humor in her voice. Glancing at the magus, she saw him smiling in acknowledgment. She continued, “Oceanus was a particular favorite of my brother Pylaster. I do this every year on this day.”

After an awkward pause, the magus cleared his throat.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I think I had forgotten today was the day—”

Done with filling the cups, she waved his comment away as she reached for a cup for herself out of the basket she had brought with her.

“It was a long time ago. I think my sisters and I are the only ones who bother anymore.” She pointed to a ring set with large pearls and a cloudy emerald, made the green of a troubled sea by its imperfections. “That is from my sister, the duchess. She leaves pearls every year. I prefer cups and wine. The others have their traditions as well.”

She offered him the cup of wine first, and he raised it toward the statue of Oceanus on the altar before drinking from it. Eddis suppressed a smile. The magus had obviously spent too much time in Eddis if he was offering wine to the altar before drinking with every appearance of sincerity and habit.

“May I ask why this particular god was his favorite?” the magus asked as he passed the cup back to her.

“Of course. It is good to speak of him. They shouldn’t be shut away except for one day a year, like the costume for a festival.” She offered the cup to the god and drank from it before speaking. “It is a silly story, I suppose, but it happened when he was a little boy so we cannot expect too much from it. There was this fish, you see.”

“A fish,” the magus repeated.

“An _impressive_ fish.”

“Ah,” the magus said. “Go on.”

“Someone had contrived to transport a very large fish, in its entirety from the sea, to the megaron as gift to my father who was Eddis before me. It arrived packed in ice, in the back of suitably large cart which it very nearly overflowed. My brother was so accustomed to the much smaller fish we get from the streams and rivers, that the sheer size of the thing impressed him as nothing had ever done before.” Her lips twitched at the thought of her eldest brother, impossibly worldly and arrogant in her child’s memory, being so entranced at a fish, however immense. “So he asked our parents what god was responsible for such a creature, because any god who could manage this monstrous thing was surely worth his adulation. And so his devotion to Oceanus was born.”

“A five days wonder, then.”

She shook her head.

“It persisted even after he was no longer a child, though in a less outwardly fervent form. I was not even born when the original was struck, and I did not find out until after he had died. Before then . . .” She shrugged. “He was my brother and strange for that reason alone. It was merely part of him. I did not question it.”

“You tell the story as if you were there.”

She sipped from the cup again before speaking.

“After my brothers died, our mother wept. Our father told stories.”

“That is an extraordinary reaction. Most men get drunk when their sons die.” He did not add that when most princes died, their fathers scurried to have more sons if they could, even if there were daughters still living.

“He was a great devotee of Moira. Forgetting was the one thing he feared the most.” She handed the cup back to the magus. “I leave a golden pen on her altar in the spring for him.”

The magus drank the last of the wine and turned the cup in his hands, studying the design of waves and fish which flowed endlessly over it.

“My mother loved a certain herb which grew near our home. She washed her hair with it, and the scent followed her wherever she went.” The cup stilled, and then started its revolution again. “I haven’t thought of that for years. I knew the name of it once, but I’ve forgotten it now. It would come back to me if I saw it. Or smelled it.”

“You should offer to Proas. The answer may come to you in a dream.”

“I have not become so Eddisian as all that,” the magus said dryly.

Only habit after all, Eddis thought as he handed the cup back to her.

When the bowl and cup were wiped dry and placed back in her basket, she stayed kneeling in front of the altar for a while, watching the way the horse traffic from the too close street made the wine in the cups shiver and listening to the way the crowd noise blended together into a distant roar. The temple was not large and it was not well placed within the city, because while Eddisians did make sea journeys, they did not make all that many. But the mind could be tricked into believing it was near the sea. She thought Pylaster might have appreciated that. His worship had been no less devout for his distance from its source — her brother, who could see wonder in a fish’s eye.

“Do you know if the queen of Attolia does anything to celebrate her brother?” she asked into this soothing non-quiet. The magus shifted behind her, as if he were growing stiff from standing for so long or as if he were uncomfortable answering the question.

“No, I do not. At least her brother and her father are never spoken of in her country. If she performs remembrances of them, it is such a secret thing that no one but she and perhaps her closest confidants know of it.” He paused. “But from what I know of her, I would say it is unlikely. She does not forgive, but she does not dwell on the past, and most of her antagonisms keep her thoroughly engaged in the here and now.”

“Like Eddis.”

“Yes,” the magus acknowledged. “And Sounis. Her barons.”

She rose and found that her knees had grown stiff on the cold floor as well. The magus lifted her basket as she performed a parting obeisance, being careful not lurch from her stiff joints. When she was finished, the magus offered her his arm and she took it, thoughtfully.

“It may do her well to think on it,” she said.

“I think she does and often,” the magus said, not pretending to not understand.

“To allow herself the luxury of not seeing his end as her own inevitable one,” Eddis corrected.

He did not say anything, and Eddis turned to go after a moment, but found she could not. The magus was fumbling in his purse for a coin, still looking at the altar and hindered by the basket.

Without hesitation, Eddis unhooked her arm from his and her garnet and pearl earrings from her ears. She placed them in his hand.

“Garnets and gold are for Hephestia, but pearls are for Oceanus. He is not jealous of his sister and will not mind the others.” When he protested, she folded his fingers over them. “They will not be the first pair of my earrings which have been dedicated to an altar by someone else.”

Wordlessly, the magus placed the earrings next to the wine cups, the pendant pearls placed just so.

“Do you not need to empty the cups before you go?” he asked. “We do in Sounis.”

“They will be empty in the morning.”

“The priests empty them?”

She shook her head.

“Well, then,” he said and nudged the earrings into more precise alignment with the cups.

  


“Would you say that my day has come now, Phresine?” Attolia asked her attendant one night as Phresine braided her hair before bed. That morning, the queen had ordered executed the last of the barons who conspired against her, and she felt cold in her triumph.

The older woman’s hands faltered at being reminded of that long ago day, disastrous for so many. There were more silver threads among the dark ones on her head now, and each one represented some lesson learned. Gone was the woman who would drag a princess out of a room to save her from being slapped by one of her father’s concubines. That had sent her back home to Kathodicia and earned her a wide swath of silver at her temples.

“I could not say, My Queen.” Her fingers began to braid again. “In the version of the story my mother told me, Iolanthe and Leta both were rewarded.”

“How so?” Attolia asked sharply.

“Iolanthe got what made her happiest — a home, a husband who loved her, and children. Leta married the north wind and saw the world, for the wind may go where he pleases and so did Leta. Her life was far more turbulent than her sister’s, but it suited her. They both had their days, eventually.”

Attolia did not reply to this, and when Phresine was done braiding her hair, she left her queen sitting at the dressing table, the light of the lamp flickering across one smooth, alabaster cheek.

  


The dull thwack of wooden swords striking each other filled the indoor practice chamber of the palace at Eddis. Outside, the practice court was covered under several feet of winter snow, with drifts nearly a man’s height piled right across its width. The snow continued to pile higher with every hour, and there was no chance of outdoor practice until it stopped falling and the court had been cleared. When that would happen, no one could tell, so the Eddisians were stuffed into a too small room, its walls padded with undyed wool cloth and straw and smelling damply of old boots and sheep.

Helen and her cousin Temenus were practicing with each other, going through the beginning exercises in orderly fashion — prime, second, third, fifth and sixth — under the watchful eye of the minister of war. Occasionally he stopped them and made some correction or suggestion, and they performed the exercises once more. Again. And again. And then again, until their young arms were burning under the weight of their children’s swords and Temenus was visibly frustrated.

“Why, father?” he asked after the minister of war had stopped them to correct his form in the fourth once more. “Why must we do this so many times? When do we spar?”

“When you stop letting your sword drift to the left in fourth, and when Helen doesn’t let hers waver in second,” the minister replied, not giving the daughter of his brother who was Eddis a reprieve from the instruction. She ducked her head and wiped a trickle of sweat from her face with her tunic sleeve. The way she had to hold her arms in second still felt unnatural to her.

“I don’t think anybody on the field of battle is going to be doing perfect beginner’s exercises,” Temenus complained.

“You would be surprised,” his father said, rapping him on the head with his knuckles. “The basics are always important. Everything is built on them. Now, again, starting with prime and proceeding as I call out the forms.”

Rubbing his head, Temenus raised his sword into position, and Helen raised hers to match him. Her cousin frowned when the minister nudged his swordpoint a fraction higher with his own fully-sized practice sword and then tapped Helen’s heel to get her feet into the proper position. She focused on Temenus like a palace cat on a trailing tassel, waiting for him to move.

“Attack,” the minister said crisply.

Temenus thrust, Helen countered without letting his blade touch her, and they fell back into the beginning position for prime. Their tutor studied them, tapped his son’s foot this time, and said, “Again.”

They went through prime several more times, the minister of war making them switch from defensive to offensive, so that Helen would not always be fending off her cousin’s attacks, and then onto the second and the third, being nudged and repositioned when they strayed from the proper form. Try though she might, Helen could not hold her sword steady in second, and every time Temenus tapped her on the shoulder or arm and once the cheek. The minister never raised his voice at her failure, but only quietly corrected the mistakes and urged her to hold her sword steady. He praised them both for their successes, but this gentle correction spurred her on like nothing else would.

She was tired and her tunic drenched with sweat under the arms when her uncle finally called for a break and led them to the water cask at one end of the room for a drink. He studied them as they drank, Helen small for her age but broad, with an intense, narrow face, and Temenus built along the lines of a young tree, all knobby height and a crown of thick curls. Children still, he thought, but not for too much longer.

“I think,” he said when he had drained his own dipper of water, “that you are both tired enough to not do too much damage to each other if I let you spar.”

Temenus leapt up from his slouch against the wall, sending his cup spinning across the floor to land in the middle of a sparring pair, who stopped and leapt apart much as the boy had. The minister gave him a stern look, and he sheepishly picked the cup up, mopping up the trail of water it left with the towel draped over the cask.

“One match,” the minister said when his son had replaced the towel and the interrupted pair had begun again after accepting apologies. “And you are to do it with everything you have learned today foremost in your mind.” He looked at them in turn. “Steady in second, Helen. Discretion and temperance for you, Temenus.”

“I am temperate!” Temenus protested.

“You are as temperate as your mother,” the minister of war said fondly.

“I’m not as bad as Gen,” his middle son muttered.

The minister of war sighed.

“Gen is a special case,” he said. He turned his attention to Helen. “Steady in second, Helen. Feel it in your wrist.”

“But I am holding the sword in my hand,” she said, uncertain of this instruction. “Shouldn’t I feel it with that?”

“And what is your hand attached to? Make sure your wrist knows what you are doing, and your hand will follow.”

She nodded, hesitantly at first and then firmly. She could imagine how the right way must feel. The hilt of the sword should shift just so when she swung, and her wrist should support the weight. It was when she let it go floppy, thinking about what everything else was doing, that Temenus got past her defenses.

They found a clear spot in the room, the minister waving a handful of young spears back to make more room for the youngsters. The spears obliged, gathering along the fringes of the space to watch the first sparring match between the princess and the minister of war’s son — the first for either of them. They were still young enough that the importance of this moment loomed large in their memories.

Their match went well for Helen, her arm knowing what to do before her head did, which proved a frustration for her cousin. His scowl grew darker and darker as they sparred, until he attacked in such a way that could only be countered in second. Her wrist, not yet knowing what to do automatically as in the other forms, faltered and so did her sword. She tried to lean back from the blow, but she was too slow and his reach was too long. Temenus, bound and determined to find glory straight from the gate, had put the whole of his weight and strength behind the strike. His sword did not so much tap her on the cheek as the flat of it cracked against it and followed through across her nose.

She dropped like a stone, hands clasped over her nose and curling herself up into a ball, in too much pain to even so much as whimper. A shout went up from the observers instead, as if they felt the pain she could not voice.

“Helen!” Temenus yelped, his sword clattering on the floor. The reality of his triumph was not to his liking, it appeared.

The sounds of the practice that had continued on around them died away, and the other youths and few soldiers in the room clustered thickly around the three figures. Her uncle knelt beside her and raised her up to sit, but she refused to lower her hands. The minister conceded the battle for a moment and rubbed her shoulder

“Boagus,” he called to one of the young spears hovering around them, the only one tall enough to reach the high, narrow window. “Fill your handkerchief with snow from the window and bring it here.”

“What, no tears, Helen?” he asked, pulling her hands away from her face in her distraction at the noise of Boagus bulling his way through the people surrounding them. “Timos wailed when Lysander broke his fingers last year.”

“It hurts too much to cry,” she admitted. Her face felt about six times its usual size, and the entirety of it throbbed. Even her voice sounded odd in her own ears, muddy and dull like she had a head cold. She licked at the blood flowing over her upper lip and stopped, because even that hurt.

She cried out all the same when her uncle grasped her nose between his thumb and forefinger and moved it from side to side. The first shock of pain had gone away by then and this new rush made itself known to every extent.

“Almost certainly broken,” he said, pushing the snow-filled handkerchief against her face and folding her hands around it to hold it in place. “Where do you think you went wrong?” he asked conversationally.

“My sword wavered in second,” she said promptly through the snow. “My wrist doesn’t know its business.”

“Practice will fix that.” He eyed his son. “And you, Temenus? Where did you err? We are not in the habit of putting our soldiers out of commission before they ever reach battle.”

“Temperance,” Temenus replied miserably. “And discretion.”

“Practice and discipline will fix that. The same for me.” He raised Helen to her feet. “We will get you to Galen, to see what can be done for your nose. Temenus, you will rack the practice swords.” Supporting her by the elbow, the minister of war guided his niece out of the room and on the long tramp across the palace to Galen’s chambers, where he lay in wait with new torments to reinforce the lesson of not wavering.

Helen spent much of the next month avoiding her cousin, who made his contrition known in outlandish acts of courtly custom — where he had learned them in the informal court of Eddis could not be known, but Helen suspected his older sisters, long since sucked into the inexplicably fascinating world of silks and jewelry, had something to do with it. He had, of all things, taken to stopping and making awkward speeches to her beauty whenever he saw her, regardless of the location or the other people present. This would have been awkward enough before, but was too much to endure with a newly crooked, swollen nose and two black eyes. His sisters had probably been reading novels from the Peninsula.

She was studying her nose in a polished silver mirror, the swelling having subsided enough to make its crookedness unavoidable, when her father found her in the library. It was the one place she was assured that no one would bother her, especially without the fire lit in the winter. Except, it appeared, the king, her father.

“Helen,” Eddis said, sounding unsurprised to find her curled into a reading chair. “We wondered where you had been hiding.”

“Temenus won’t leave me alone. He keeps making speeches in apology.”

“With all these books, he’ll be sure to stay away.” Eddis rummaged through the rack which held maps of the three kingdoms and Melenze. “Have you seen the maps of the islands?” he asked her.

She came to the rack, still holding the mirror, and found the rolled-up map showing the islands which Sounis, Attolia, and Eddis all variously claimed and possession of which regularly cycled, more frequently to Sounis and Attolia. She and her father spread it across a library table, and absently she used the mirror to weight one of the corners.

“What is the mirror for?” he asked, the fourth map weight in his hand.

Helen frowned at it, lying next to her left hand and reflecting back a view of the murals painted on the ceiling. The goddess Moira was at the center, recording the events of human history, while famous scenes from Eddis’s history were depicted around the perimeter. It must have been welcome respite for the mirror, after having had to shine back her own reflection all afternoon.

“It tells truths,” she said at last, a product of too many of Temenus’s Peninsular speeches.

“And to think I did not even know we owned it,” her father said dryly. “It would be very useful in council sessions.” When that did not get a smile from her, he continued, “What sort of truths?”

“That my nose is crooked and I am ugly.” She would not shy from it; there was no escaping it when she carried it around with her.

Her father laughed, and she glared at him, hurt and feeling sorry for herself.

“Beauty is not everything, Helen,” Eddis said, still smiling. “Look at what happened to your namesake.”

“That’s a story. Stories aren’t true.”

He made a thoughtful noise and pointed to the paintings running around the edge of the ceiling.

“The murals are stories, and enough people believe them that they are true. Stories do not need to be true in every particular. I don’t think your great-grandfather who was Eddis before me strode into battle wearing nothing but a wisp of linen, do you? Though he did fight, very bravely.” He paused, looking up at his ancestor, who was responsible for the purchase of half the arms and armor in the megaron’s stores, and who had been preserved for all time as nearly naked. “And I would not say such things beneath Moira. She hears everything, and it is best to keep her sweetly disposed toward you.”

Chastened, Helen hung her head and mumbled an apology to her father and promised to leave a tribute at Moira’s shrine. Her father accepted her apology and gestured at the map spread before them.

“Now,” he said, “if you were to make a claim on any of these islands, which would it be?”

She looked at the scattered, irregular shapes of the islands. Her first instinct was the claim the biggest ones, as the most useful and likely to be worth something, but as a mountain country, Eddis was not well disposed to defend possessions at sea. Their coasts were all cliffs and offered no harbors of any size. If they wanted to, then they would have to hire warships and mercenaries, and their treasuries did not extend to do such a thing on a grand scale.

“I would start with the smallest, most useful ones near our shore, and then grab these as my power grew,” she said, marching a line across the map with her fingers. Her finger hovered over a pair of middle-sized islands. “Once we got here, we would be in a good position to make a bid for others. And these would be convenient for many things, even if we did not go further.”

“You have been paying attention in your lessons,” Eddis said approvingly, ruffling her hair gently. She felt herself flush with pleasure. “There has been suggestion from the rulers of our neighboring kingdoms that some of the larger islands could become neutral, to the economic benefit of everyone involved. Our linens and wools could travel farther and to an appreciative and rich audience on the Continent.”

“That would be very good.”

“Very good indeed. It would mean more novels from the Peninsula for Temenus to study from.” She made a face, and he hugged her to him briefly. “I need some quiet to think this over. It will not come without costs, though not quite as many as your clever plan. Will you join the rest of the palace again? It is almost time for dinner.”

As she turned to leave, her father called her name and she turned back. He grasped her chin between his thumb and first two fingers and turned her face this way and that, making a study of her. After studying herself in the mirror for so long, she realized that she was very like him in appearance. She saw herself reflected in his dark eyes, and the only thing it told her was that he loved her. Why then did she feel like she was a disappointment?

“It suits you,” he said at last. “You are very fierce with your new nose. Determined.”

“The princesses in stories are never fierce. They are always as beautiful as the dawn or the wind or something like that.”

“Stories need not be true in every particular, remember. Hespira was fierce to go with Meridite, though she tried to poison her. Meridite’s son loved Hespira for her cleverness and her singing, not her face.” He released her chin. “Men are strange creatures, even the half-mortal sons of goddesses. There is hope for you yet, my darling child.”

She nodded, not quite understanding or believing. Her father waved her away and turned back to his map, but when she reached the door, he called out.

“Helen,” he said, not looking up, “second isn’t as complicated as your uncle makes it out to be. If you want the sword to be steady, it will be steady. As simple as that.”

This she understood. She had practiced many times in private, and her sword grew more steady with every repetition, fueled by her desire to not waver. By the time she was allowed back to practice with the other youths, it would be as steady as a rock.

“Thank you, father,” she said, delighted he finally had said something which made sense and nearly running out the door to dress for dinner.

“Lerna and Hannipus.” When she was gone, Eddis touched the islands she had pointed out under Moira’s gaze. “Lerna and Hannipus will be important.”

  


She remembers this: The day had been fine and she had wanted to go bounding across the summer-dry grass of the Attolian plain, worry shaken out of her by the jouncing gait of her third-rate horse, a suitable mount for the nearly nameless daughter of an overshadowed king.

  


They were played into the main temple at Eddis by the pipes and drums carried by the matrons who had helped Eddis dress. Already in the pronaos, unmarried girls sang shrilly in front of them in praise of the bridegroom. From the entrance on the other side of the building, their male counterparts could be heard doing the same for Eddis, their voices and playing obscured by the distance but joyful. The throb of the music from both parties combined to fill the entire space of the naos as Attolia led Eddis through the entranceway. With a sudden flurry of drumming from the musicians on either end of the temple, they reached the altar at the center of naos where the priestess of Hephestia waited.

The drumming cut off abruptly as they met Sounis and Attolis approaching from the other direction, the silence profound in contrast to the noise of only an instant before. Attolia’s ears rang with it, and she steadied Eddis as she rocked on her feet at the surprise.

All that could be seen of Sounis’s face was his twisted smile beneath the red sash which covered his eyes. His hair had been sprinkled with gold dust, and some of it had flaked off to land on the shoulders of his robe like a benediction. Attolis held him by the elbow with his left hand, as if to stop him from floating off in his buoyancy. The king of Attolia himself seemed rooted to the ground, but excitement ran through him, evident in the carriage of his body and the brightness of his eyes. The priestess gave the invocation, and the ceremony began.

When the time came for Attolis and Attolia to lead the bridal couple around the altar on the first circuit, not a one of them stumbled. Eugenides’s false hand was planted firmly in the middle of Sophos’s back, and his grip on his hand was equally as tight as that of his on his bride’s. Attolia could feel that strength radiating along the line to her own grip on Eddis’s hand, and she hoped that the very care with which she placed her feet traveled the same pathway.

The thick smoke from burning incense stung Attolia’s eyes, and by the time they were done with their circuit and had handed the couple off to Sounis’s parents, tears were streaming from the corners of her eyes. She glanced away for respite, and two figures in the crowd filling the temple caught her attention.

He was not exceptional — with a narrow, clever face and short, black hair he might have been a guest from any of their kingdoms, though very deeply tanned. Unusual, this far from summer but not extraordinary. It was his companion who stood out.

In an unheated temple at the beginning of an Eddisian winter, she wore a chiton as thin and sheer as the shift Eddis had put on that morning and nothing else. Neither her face nor her bare arms were flushed with cold. Her chiton and the curls piled on her head moved as if there were a breeze blowing continuously over them, but there was none in in the temple. The smoke hung thick and cloying all around the altar, and there was nothing to stir it.

Attolia had seen gods before, but in her dreams. Gods were not supposed to appear in the day, among mortals as if they _were_ mortals. Anger stirred up in her, as if she had been trespassed against in some great way.

She looked up from her study of the goddess, intent on ignoring them both, but met the eyes of the god and found she could not. Cold sweat dappled her skin, and the sensation of resounding silence returned to her. His eyes were dark and infinite. She felt that his gaze took much more than it gave, and she wanted something in return. Had she not already given so much of herself with nothing but her continuing breath in exchange?

Suddenly, Attolis’s hand was at her elbow, and the crowd around her was shifting and sighing, loud like a beehive is loud with the nearly inaudible buzzing of every bee. Her eyes stung again with the smoke, and she blinked to clear them. When she opened them, the god and goddess were gone, and Eddis was unknotting Sounis’s blindfold, and he was lifting her veil, and they were married.

As they began their independent circling of the altar, Eugenides’s grasp on her arm tightened, questioning if she was well.

“The smoke was too strong,” she murmured to him under the cover of the crowd’s distraction, but it was a lie. Closed tight in her hand was something small, round, and ridged. It was cold metal at first, but it warmed in her hand until she could hardly know it was there. A button, and she was sure it was gold.

  


Eddis woke with a jerk, chased into waking by her dreams. For a moment, she was uncertain of where she was, until the sound of the sea drifted across the night-dark city to the window of her room in Sounis’s megaron.

She sat up slowly and shoved her short hair off her face, as if she could comb the bad dream out. It fell back into her consciousness instead, bit by bit. A crowd of men and women filling the great court of the palace at Eddis as she descended the steps. The crowd parting to form a corridor for her to pass through, and as she passed, her inability to recognize a single one. Where she should see faces that she had known since childhood, she saw only masks like those worn at the spring plays. Caricatures of young lovers, jokes of old men and matrons, and everywhere the smooth, false faces of the chorus, expressionless for all their grimacing. They stood in ranks, these people she did not know, though she should, for they made up Eddis and she was Eddis. They were a part of her, and she did not know them.

Discomforted, she shifted in the bed at her new home. It was a fragile thing, the way her very breath and existence kept Eddis alive. The reality of it was laid in her bones, and she suddenly ached in her marrow for the mountains and valleys left behind and carried in her. She could no longer cross the distance from Sounis’s capital here on the coast to the mountains, and even if she could, she carried them both beneath her skin now, joined in one flesh to her husband who was Sounis.

“Helen?” As if summoned by her thoughts, he spoke. Sophos’s voice was rough with sleep but it warmed her. “There is something wrong?”

“Only a bad dream, Sophos,” she said, letting her fondness for him into her voice and hoping it would settle him.

“What sort of dream?” he asked, as fully awake now as if she had poured water on him. Dreams had been used often enough to communicate the will of the gods to them both.

“Of my own making,” she assured him.

In the faint light of the lamp left burning by their bed, he visibly relaxed, the tension flowing out of him with every flicker of the flame. He propped himself up on one arm and raised the covers in invitation.

“You will tell me about it?” he asked quietly.

“I do not know if you want to hear it.”

“If it is your dream and it has upset you, then I wish to hear it,” he insisted. He smiled. “If only so I can go back to sleep.”

She laughed and slid across the bed and into his arms. Sophos dropped the covers over both of them, a small, warm space against the autumn night. Where it was already winter in the mountains, summer had still been lingering when they arrived at the megaron after their wedding. It would not grow as cold here, but even so, there was a damp chill in the air which made promises for winter. And what would that winter be like without snow and bone-deep cold? With only rain and ice gone by midday?

“There was a great crowd in the court at my megaron, and I did not know them,” she began telling him, and finished with, “And then I knew one, a cousin. Cleon. I knew him by his bandages — he was wounded on the thigh before he died. He was waiting for me at the end of this corridor of people, and when I reached him, he said, ‘My Queen.’ And then, from all around me, a chorus of people saying it over and over, until it woke me. Endless, anonymous sound, a rolling wave of it.”

Sophos did not speak at once, but smoothed the hair back from her face and held her in his arms until her shivers passed.

“I dream sometimes of the men killed before I was captured by the Mede ambassador,” he admitted when she was calm. “I never knew their names, but I know their faces.”

“Theodotos, Aristedes, Bion, Nector, and Archaeus.” She hesitated. “I cannot tell you the names of the Attolians. Those I do not know.”

“Gen will know. I am glad you know.”

Eddis was silent as he stroked her hair, lost in thought.

“Irene will know, too,” she said so quietly Sophos stilled his hand and asked her to repeat herself.

“Will she?” he asked, doubtful.

“Memory has never been her problem. It is the way she sifts it.” She considered again. “Was. Was the way. She will know. I promise it.”

Sounis resumed stroking her hair, lulling her back toward sleep.

“If you promise me it, then it will be so,” he said at last.

  


Below their position on the wall of the megaron, the celebration of the wedding of Eddis and Sounis continued in the snow-dusted courts. The wedding guests, urged on by the same instruments which had heralded the entrance of the bridal couple into the temple, danced in a snaking line which wound out of the feast hall and through the upper streets of the mountain city. In the first raucous stirrings of the dance, Attolis had slipped through a hidden exit to the hall with Attolia in tow. She had not even known it existed, but was long past being surprised by her husband’s knowledge of such things.

They had arrived on the roof walk through a series of the oldest hallways in the megaron, most of which she had not know existed, either, but which she assumed other people were aware of. The halls were abandoned, except for a few sparsely posted guards who had the courtesy to not notice them, or perhaps did not begin to see them. She had grown so accustomed to passing without comment in the few minutes it took them to reach the roof walk, that she was surprised to see the pair of guards dressed in Attolian silver and blue waiting for them.

“A compromise with Teleus,” Eugenides murmured. “Now that I have begun to like him, I find it hard to refuse him, even when he is not here.”

“He is yours to command.”

The king sighed.

“Yes, that’s the problem.”

There was an explosive cheer from the crowd gathered in the courtyard below the wall, and Attolia leaned past a crenelation to see what caused it.

When Attolia looked back at her husband, Eugenides had climbed up on the low-hanging eave, his feet at the level of her eyes. He tossed his heavy and elaborate coat down on the roof walk next to her, its gilt embroidery shining in the light from the torches. She looked up as he swung his arms, as if he were shaking off the weight of the coat and the stresses of the day all at the same time. He seemed to change as she watched him, like the flame in a lamp when the shade is removed. He dropped down on his haunches and studied her, solemnly.

“My Queen,” he asked, extending his hand toward her, “will you dance?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the guards, who, with courtesy equal to that of the Eddisians, had turned their backs on their king and queen. She thought of the narrow-faced man she had seen in the temple, and she thought of herself, dancing alone in the gardens as a girl. She thought of Eugenides saying, “It probably only works in Eddis.”

“Yes,” she said. She felt suddenly light and liquid, and she took his hand, rough against her own soft skin. “Yes.”

  



End file.
